The embodiments herein relate generally to the field of tracking medication use of a user. More specifically, embodiments of the invention relate to a system for tracking medication usage and providing alerts, notifications and reports on such usage to parties of interest such as care-givers, nurses, doctors, pharmacists and family members.
Research has shown that errors occur when patients take a prescribed medicine. This is a common occurrence for elderly patients and/or people suffering from a mental illness. Such errors may lead to overdosing if the medication is taken too early or under dosing if the medication is not taken within the proper time frame. There is a further need in the industry to recognize when a user's medication needs to be refilled so there is no interruption in the medication use. Physicians would also like to know if prescribed medication has been taken correctly by the user to better assess the effectiveness of a prescribed dosage. In clinical settings or managed-care facilities and hospital settings, administrators are required to be vigilant about medication dosages, especially in non-intensive facilities where medication usage is left to individual patients or less skilled care-givers.
There exists a variety of systems for tracking medication use by a user through the use of alarms and/or timers that are placed on a medication bottle cap, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,317,390, 7,138,906, 7,382,692, 6,845,064, 6,667,936 and 7,907,477. However, these systems are limited because they do not generate data regarding the user's consumption of the medicine in the bottle, which is then transmitted via a network to other parties of interest.
As such, there is a need in the industry for a system for the real-time tracking of medication use by a user, which generates data pertaining to the medication use and transmits the data to a network so that the data may be readily accessible to parties of interest.